Neverdead: Fun Premise, Awkward Controls

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A quirky premise can't make me look past awkward control choices.

By Anthony Gallegos

It would be fine if I never played Neverdead again. Maybe that's a bit harsh because what I played was a pre-release build, but seeing that it comes out in less than two months, I doubt a lot of the issues I have with it will be addressed. While our own Ryan Clements compared its combat to "the action in the Devil May Cry series," this couldn't be farther from my own experience. Despite its unique and sometimes charming premise, the fighting feels stilted, like the designers of Neverdead have learned nothing from similar action games that preceded it.

Wait, you haven't heard of Neverdead? That's understandable; it's only been shown a few times since its announcement. The gist: you play as an immortal demon hunter named Bryce and, along with your companion Arcadia, are out to kick some ass. You can be dismembered, set on fire, electrocuted and maimed, but you'll never die. You can regrow your body and recover, and you use this to your advantage in battle. You fail, however, if your mortal partner Arcadia dies.

Your character may be able to recover from dismemberment, but in his many years, he's never learned to fight all that well. Unlike Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or any other number of games, you have to actively switch between ranged and melee combat in Neverdead. This means there's a pause, however brief, between when you're brutally slashing foes and gunning them down. The fluidity of the other games mentioned is lost, making it impossible to chain together savagely beautiful combos that make you feel empowered. In Neverdead, you're either shooting or you're swinging your sword, never doing both with any sort of rapid exchange.

Neither of the combat types feel all that great, either. Other games that pitch groups of enemies at you typically have a character that auto-locks on targets, leaving you less concerned with aiming and more concerned with using your guns at just the right time to turn you into a whirling dervish of death. Neverdead is more a standard third-person shooter, though, making it so you have to do all your own aiming. Fine, I can deal with that (I enjoy third-person shooters), but the aiming just doesn't feel smooth. I was aiming down the barrels of my guns, fighting against floaty controls in an effort to get a bead on a number of fast moving demons. It wasn't much fun, and I often just switched to melee fighting because it felt at least marginally better.

I understand why the shooting doesn't support auto-lock, to a degree. All the environments in Neverdead are largely destructible and can be used to crush demons. So while locking onto an enemy might have been useful for greater flow in the shooting, it also wouldn't allow you to quickly aim and shoot a pillar out at just the right moment. It helps to make battles more dynamic, but the aiming is just a bit too loose to make me super effective at blowing out the environment at the right times.

While the shooting doesn't give you an auto-lock solution, melee combat does. Holding the shoulder button allows you to lock onto an enemy, strafing around them as you slash away at them with your giant butterfly sword. I can dig that, I like to get up close and personal to spill the blood of my enemies, but Neverdead again confounds me with its controls. To slash a foe you have to waggle the right analog stick back and forth, resulting in combat that feels awkward and takes away your ability to control the camera. In a game where I should feel like a badass warrior I felt more like a bumbling oaf, just relying on my immortality to overcome my mediocre battle skills. The tried and true "press a face button to attack" has worked for years now, and this wiggling the stick doesn't make it more immersive, it just made it feel tedious and silly.

Though "silly" is kind of the modus operandi of Neverdead. You're constantly dismembered by enemies, bouncing around on a single leg or rolling around as just a head. The idea that you have to collect your limbs or regrow them, and that you can intentionally dismember yourself to do things like bait enemies or make yourself more compact to fit into tighter spaces is charming. But the puzzles I played with also felt a bit contrived. More than once in the demo I had to shock myself to fall into pieces, rolling just my head through a tight space in order to proceed. The key to a great hook is to make sure that you use it in creative and inspired ways throughout the experience, so hopefully Neverdead doesn't redo the same situations too much.

Maybe everything gets better with more powers. As you kill demons and find collectibles in the environment you'll eventually be able to afford new skills. You can buy abilities like being able to shoot flaming bullets whenever you set your character on fire, or the power to throw your arm and have it explode. The list of unlocks is fairly substantial, and I'd love for those unlocks to make the combat more entertaining.

Neverdead comes out January 31st, 2012. In the world of video games, that's right around the corner, meaning that the problems I have with it won't likely be resolved. Maybe, with adjusted expectations, Neverdead could be fun, but for now, it left me with a soured first impression. This isn't like other Japanese inspired action games; it's not as fluid or silky feeling as the likes of Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden. Clunky shooting and awkward melee combat overrides the initial charm of the premise, and I doubt a lengthier play session will change that when the fundamental mechanics just don't resonate with me.